Cheap Intelligence

OpenAI and Anthropic are the two leaders of the artificial intelligence (AI) pack, whose frontier models keep making huge leaps in efficiency. But there is also SpaceXAI, which is slowly building itself into an alternative under Elon Musk. On September 21, it released its latest version, Grok 4.7, which is claimed to be a big improvement. Benchmark reports put it within touching distance of Claude’s Opus 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, though still clearly below their top models Fable and Astra.

Musk claims that at some point, Grok will be as good or even better than the rest. He had earlier posted, “Grok 4.7 should be roughly on par with Opus 5.0, not 5.1. Better in some ways, worse in others. We need to fix multimodal performance. Grok 4.8 will be a noticeable improvement. Grok 4.9 is probably Astra/Fable class. Grok 5 maybe better than anything. We shall see.”

Even otherwise, despite lagging behind, it makes for competition because it is cheaper. Grok 4.7’s output tokens, what you pay for the model’s response, is also substantially cheaper. This makes it inviting for users because most don’t need the best technology out there. Chinese models remain the cheapest but many markets outside are suspicious of them because of privacy and security concerns.

AI Breach

In a rare disclosure recently by Chinese AI firm Z.ai, which is also referred to as Zhipu AI, it admitted a security breach by its coding assistance tool ZCode. The tool, users in China discovered, was uploading their code data from an open-source platform to overseas cloud servers without their consent. The firm claimed the issue originated from the tool’s ‘Codebase Indexing’ feature, which was enabled by default, and that it has patched the vulnerability.

Apple Pay

Apple may have made inroads in the retail and manufacturing scene in India, with the country emerging as a big hub for manufacturing iPhones and as a market to sell to. Now, Apple appears to be close to launching its mobile payment service, Apple Pay. This launch, reports claim, will happen next month. Apple Pay enables iPhone users to make tap-and-pay purchases using tokenised card details stored on their devices.

Game Play

Ads are a common phenomenon in mobile games, where they show up usually between levels or after failed attempts. Microsoft, it seems, wants to bring ads to PC and console games too, but is looking for a different method. It has filed a patent for what it calls a ‘contextually aware’ ad system. Instead of interrupting play on a fixed schedule, the system, it is said, will use game data to identify a natural ad break.